Dixel Club V1

One shared 16x16 pixel canvas on BNB Chain. Anyone could overwrite pixels and mint the result as an SVG-based NFT, earning $DIXEL when someone later painted over their work.

The bet

We drew a line against script-generated collections. We believed one people drew by hand, together on a shared canvas, was worth more. We called it the first-ever Draw to Earn digital collectible platform, and the rules matched: 100% community-made pixel art, and all profits to the community, not to the team.

What worked

Mainnet went live on BNB Chain on 7 February 2022, at block height 15040000, with a launch airdrop to the AirNFT, PancakeSwap NFT, BakerySwapV3 NFT, MintedVodka and Mint Club communities. It shipped as a full product, not a demo: a drawing editor, a gallery, a rewards page, a burn-for-refund flow, a marketplace and a $DIXEL buy flow. The economics were onchain: each pixel cost 0.1% more after every overwrite, 10% of a mint split among everyone who had painted those pixels before, and the other 90% held in a refundable reserve the owner could claim by burning the NFT. One undated capture of the live gallery shows the shared canvas at edition #877 with 170,485 overwritten pixels.

What broke

The idea was novel, but demand for making pixel art turned out thinner than we expected. The people who did show up were artists, and they did not want to share a single canvas with everyone else. They wanted their own collection, with their own followers minting color variants of it.

What it seeded

That demand became Dixel Club V2, which is still live. DIXEL itself was minted on the Mint Club protocol, so V1 ran on the curves Hunt Town still builds on.